599 M04
I love getting returns on investment. Or, in this case, reciprocal gifts. While I had been focusing on breadth of research into wraithbone, dabbling in just about every field, the Emperor had decided to go all in on depth of research; on the mass of wraithbone specifically. The thing he had been searching for? Virtual mass. And with good reason too. Being able to selectively express which parts of physics reacted as though there were a giant mass in specific places was a huge help for a number of technologies. The most immediately applicable and interesting was with the gravitational lensing technology.
Gravitational lensing had two primary downsides.
One is that you needed at least one fuckoff huge ship over a hundred kilometers long to breach the energy barrier required to initiate the effect. These long, skinny space needles were about as maneuverable as trying to ride a greased angry pig bareback, thanks to the relative cross-sectional area vs the mind-bogglingly huge moment of inertia. Of course, once the spatial compression was actually in effect, you could travel with as many ships as you wanted, so long as they all fit in the sphere 112 km wide sphere determined by the very ends of the spatial compressor ship itself. It's one of the reasons why getting stations set up was so important, those spatial compression ships were a pain in the ass to move around. Especially since all the other ships in the fleet had to be close enough that they were in accidental smacking range when the mostly unmanned needles were turning.
The second is that it was useless or at least very slow for traveling to low-mass stars. Half a solar mass dropped your speed down to less than one lightyear per day, and if you wanted to visit a brown dwarf for some reason? Hope you enjoy less than a third of a lightyear per day. You could kind of get around it if there was a more massive star roughly in line with your direction of travel and behind the brown dwarf, but targeting started to become an issue, and keeping the fleet together suddenly became an order of magnitude harder because of the relative motion.
Having access to virtual mass on demand solved both of those issues, at least to some extent. Suddenly the minimum length of a ship required to breach the energy barrier was just under a dozen kilometers, which meant that if you were willing to build pretty big ships, every interstellar vessel could have true FTL capabilities, which meant that an armada couldn't be stranded just by taking out the one visibly distinct space needle. The more interesting effect though, was that you could target two sources of mass for the spatial compression, the destination star, and the virtual mass of the ship itself. Thanks to how the math worked out, we could currently manage a virtual mass large enough for 0.8 lightyear per day travel. 0.8 lightyears per day was completely irrelevant when traveling longer distances, since you could just use larger stars and the supermassive starways, but it was a godsend for traveling to low mass stars, or even to interstellar space. Suddenly every stellar destination could manage more than a lightyear per day, and even interstellar space could be accurately targeted with nearly a lightyear per day, which also meant that it could be safely used for in-system maneuvering, at long last.
So now our ships were much more nimble when puttering around a star, and we no longer had to account for entire fleets moving together in order to make any FTL transits worthwhile. Space tourism wasn't quite possible on an individual scale, since you did still require a ship a dozen kilometers long, but suddenly visiting people on other planets and living around other stars was a much more reasonable concept.
Of course, all of that travel could be made four or five times faster by using the warp-skimming method the Emperor and I had devised, but after getting so far with technology that didn't leave any detectable warp presence from each transit, we were loath to start leaving highly detectable wakes behind our ships. That, and our proto-Gellar fields weren't as strong as we wanted when we ran the simulations for being powered by individual humans and what technology they were bringing with them, rather than being powered by Big E or myself.
Technically, warp protective shields weren't required to use warp skimming, but that assumed a smooth warp. If the reaspace-interface surface of the warp was churned up for any reason, you would get literal waves of Chaos energies washing over the ships. It required an extremely choppy warp storm to get that bad, but we knew what was coming, and "extremely choppy" was an understatement.
Speaking of which, preparations for the birth of Slaanesh were going well, albeit slowly. With my cute little Exodite friends spreading the word of a specific doom-date among the Eldar that cared to listen, many more Eldar heard the date as a byproduct, and it was causing an interesting crystallization in the warp. Normally, events that caused societal change made future-sight less predictable, but with a very specific doom-date to look forward to, and indeed, many of the pleasure-seeking Eldar that heard such a date were looking forwards to it, it was turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy. While the prediction used to be 140 M30 plus or minus a decade, we could now narrow it down to 141 M30 plus or minus a few months. By the time we hit M30, it was going to be accurate down to a few days if the trend continued.
Oh, and my cute little Exodites were getting somewhat of a reputation. "Void-touched" they were called, and while a very select few Eldar were glad for the advanced warning, the vast, vast majority dug their heels in and plugged their metaphorical pointy ears. That tribe that I contacted, and eventually all the tribes on that planet, were both slowly building a rapport with me, and were getting very good at fighting. After all, when a pleasure-seeking Eldar is given bad news, "shoot the messenger" isn't just the overall plan, that plan then gains extra steps like "and then play with the body".
I got a kick out of the fact that the Void-touched Exodites were becoming hyper-lethal escape artists and they had taken to my instructions with gusto. I guess such an important, but more importantly difficult and somber "duty" was right in line with their philosophy of self-denial and honest hard work. That, and they made the funniest faces any time I gave them more news.
